These slides—based on the research webinar from leading IT research firm EMA and Pluribus Networks—dive into how software defined packet brokers can close the visibility gap on your network.

1. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Democratize Observability with
Software-Defined Packet Brokers
Shamus McGillicuddy
VP of Research, Network Management
Enterprise Management Associates (EMA)
Alessandro Barbieri
VP Product Management
Pluribus Networks

2. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Watch the On-Demand Webinar
Slide 2
• Democratize Observability with Software Defined Packet Brokers
On-Demand Webinar: https://info.enterprisemanagement.com/democratize-
observability-with-software-defined-packet-brokers-webinar-ws
• Check out upcoming webinars from EMA here:
https://www.enterprisemanagement.com/freeResearch

3. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Featured Speakers
Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, EMA
Shamus is the vice president of research covering network management
at Enterprise Management Associates, where he leads the network
management practice. He has worked in the IT industry since 2006 as an
industry analyst and journalist.
Slide 3 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Alessandro Barbieri, VP Product Management, Pluribus Networks
Alessandro has over 17 years of engineering, technical marketing and product
management experience in the networking industry. Prior to joining Pluribus,
Alessandro served as the Director of Product Management for several of
Cisco’s Data Center and Enterprise networking product lines.

4. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Agenda
Slide 4 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
1
Network Packet Brokers: What
and Why?
5
Use Cases and Best Practices for
SDPBs
2
Packet Broker Requirements and
Challenges
6
Pluribus Networks SDPB Solution
Summary
3
Emerging Opportunity: Software
Defined Packet Brokers (SDPBs)
7 Q&A
4 Advantages of SDPBs

5. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Slide 5 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
The Whats and Whys of
Network Packet Brokers

6. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
What is a Network Packet Broker?
Slide 6 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Packet flow aggregation
• Stream all mirrored ports to central tool
• End-to-end visibility
Packet manipulation and filtering
• Modify packets (strip headers, add metadata)
• Filter traffic
Packet distribution
• Send customized packet streams to
each tool
• Load balance packet streams across multiple
tool instances

7. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Multiple Tools Need to Analyze the Same Packet Flows
Slide 7 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Director of infrastructure,
large financial services company
“If we had one giant device that
could collect everything, that
would be great. Instead, I have
nine devices collecting [and
analyzing] packets.”
70% of IT organizations have both
real-time and forensic performance
management tools
Average enterprise has more than
three security monitoring tools
connected to NPBs

8. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
A Packet Broker in Action
Slide 8 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Network
Packet Broker Traffic
Recorder
Intrusion
Protection
Security
Monitoring
Forensics
Performance
Monitoring
Tool Farm
Ingress from
TAP/SPAN/Mirror
Production Network

9. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Packet Broker-Based Visibility Fabrics Optimize NetOps
EMA research: NPB users are
Slide 9 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
41%
54%
29%
64%
Most succesful
Less successful
Successful NetOps teams more
likely to use NPBs
NPBs installed
No NPBs
Sample Size = 350
Less likely to struggle with
network team skills gaps
Higher rates of SLA compliance
More responsive to new
business initiatives
EFFICIENT
RELIABLE
BUSINESS-
ALIGNED

10. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Business Alignment in Depth
Slide 10 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Network teams with NPBs tend to support
more technical initiatives
Data center refreshes
Data center
consolidation
Cross-domain
security initiatives
Cloud-native apps
Mobility
IoT
Public cloud
VDI
Compliance

11. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Most common benefits of applying NPBs to
security solutions
Improved uptime 46%
Reduced security risk 43%
Security team productivity 36%
Revenue generation 29%
Packet Broker Fabrics Improve Security
Slide 11 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.

12. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Slide 12
Packet Broker Requirements
and Challenges

13. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Vertically integrated NPBs
Feature-rich High performance
Expensive
• Nearly ¼ of NPB users struggle
significantly with budget
• NPB users with flat budgets LESS
successful with NPBs
Cost efficiency improves visibility:
Broader fabric
Fewer blind spots
Capture east-west traffic
Capture traffic in remote
sites
© 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Slide 13
Packet Broker Cost Efficiency is Essential

14. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Cost-Efficient Visibility Can Optimize DevOps
Slide 14 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Director of infrastructure,
large financial services company
“The biggest challenge we have is
east-west traffic.”
“Our packet monitoring… saw a lot of LDAP traffic going
on every morning. It was pretty clear that an application’s
microservice was going out and caching everything.”
“The developer had no concept of the of traffic he was
generating. I was able to go in with our tool and explain
to the development team that their application was
degrading performance.”

15. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Prioritize Packet Broker Management Automation
Slide 15 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Significant NPB management challenges
1/3 Network team skills gaps
1/4 Security team skills gaps
1/4 Network teams withhold admin
access from security
Centralize and automate NPB
fabric automation
38% prefer a centralized GUI console
25% prefer API-driven management (full
automation)
Only 16% prefer box-by-box CLI
management

16. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Focus on Packet Broker Performance
and Reliability
Slide 16 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Senior IT consultant
“Data quality is the biggest issue
[with performance management].
If your data model isn’t accurate,
there is no point in reporting on it.”
Be ready to scale performance
55% of enterprises plan to have 400
GbE networks installed by 2022
Build a fabric for data quality
31% of NetOps teams: Performance
management seriously undermined by
packet drops, errors

17. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Slide 17
Emerging Opportunity:
Software-Defined Packet Brokers

18. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Emerging Opportunity: Software-Defined Packet Brokers
Slide 18 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
NPBs are traditionally vertically
integrated, premium appliances
Open networking industry has
expanded to NPBs
94% of NPB users have interest in new
software-defined NPBs
Perceptions on potential benefits
Flexible software options 45%
Flexible hardware options 40%
Reduced complexity 34%
Reduced OpEx 29%
Reduced CapEx 26%

19. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Democratize Observability with
Software-Defined Packet Brokers
Alessandro Barbieri
VP Product Management
Pluribus Networks

20. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
What is a Software Defined Packet Broker?
Wide choice of open
networking hardware.
Software Defined Network
Provisioning
Network Operating System
NOS
Network Packet Broker
Policies and Services
NOS software
disaggregated from
hardware
20

21. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
SDPB Advantages: Lower Capex
21
Lower cost for equivalent capacity More hardware options 
deploy only the ports you need
Typical NPB SDPB
Silicon Custom Merchant
Switch
Purpose-built,
lower volume
Open whitebox,
hyperscale
economics
Software Integrated Disaggregated
Total Cost 100% ~50-75%

22. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
SDPB Advantages: Scalability and Performance
22
SDPB Capability Benefits
✓ Fully modular, scale-out fabric, mix/match port speeds
Scale flexibly from single switch to multi-switch, multi-site
Graceful upgrades 10-25-100-400G
✓ High resilience and sub-second failover Ensure continuous monitoring and visibility
✓ Dynamic load balancing and automatic path discovery Use network capacity efficiently to lower capex, opex
SDPB Network Fabric
TAP/SPAN/Mirror
Tools
Production Network

23. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
SDPB Advantages: Operational Simplification, Lower Opex
23
Single point of management
SDN abstraction and automation
SDPB Network Fabric
TAP/SPAN/Mirror
Tools
SDPB Capability Benefits
✓ “Virtual chassis” operational model Simplified operations at any scale
✓ SDN abstraction – services and policies decoupled from
underlying network topology
Simplified service and policy provisioning
✓ Built-in automation with global declarative policies –
one command programs the entire fabric
Reduce configuration effort ~95%, eliminate manual errors
Production Network
“Virtual Chassis”

24. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
SDPB Use Cases
24

25. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
SDPB Single Switch Deployment
• Cost-effective entry point
• Start small, scale up as needed
• Wide range of hardware choices
12-128 ports of 10G/25G, up to 32x400G
T
T
TAPS
Tools
25

26. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
European Cyber-security Agency
SDPB Single Switch Use Case Example
26
• TAPs and mirror ports connected
via fiber 1/10G
• Security monitoring tools
connected at 40/100G
• Up to 48 ports
• N:1 and 1:N aggregation,
replication, filtering
• Configurable oversubscription
TAPs
1
2
3
4
7
8
44
43
Mirrored
Traffic
…
…
1/10G
T
T
T
T
T
T
46
45
47
48
40/100G
Tools

27. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
US Multi-state Health Care Provider
SDPB Multi-site Use Case Example
27
• Aggregate distributed TAPs to
centralized tools over existing
IP WAN
• Shared, centralized tools reduce
capex vs. duplicated tools
• Cost-effective hardware sized to
each site’s needs
• Only filtered traffic crosses the
WAN, lowering bandwidth costs
• Centralized management lowers
operational costs
IP MPLS
WAN
Local
TAPs
Centralized
Tools
Remote
TAPs
Centralized
Management
T T T
T T T T
T T
T T T
Filtered
Traffic

28. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
Pluribus Network Packet Broker Solution
28

29. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
Building Packet Broker Solutions on a Foundation of Open Networking and SDN
Pluribus Networks
• High-performance, cost-
effective open networking
foundation
• Controllerless SDN
automation for operational
simplicity
• Highly flexible, scalable fabric
architecture
• Increasingly rich packet
broker service features
• Mission-critical experience,
deployed in over 80 tier one
service providers
Packet Broker Solutions
Strategic Partnerships
Global Customer Base – Service Provider + Enterprise
Award-winning Innovation
29

30. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
Pluribus Networks Packet Broker Solution
Wide choice of open
networkinghardware.
Switchesact like servers.
ControllerlessSDN
application runsdirectly on
each switch
Netvisor®ONE
NOS
UNUM FabricManagement +
NPBServiceProvisioning+
Insight Analytics
on-box software
AdaptiveCloudFabric™
Network Packet Broker
PoliciesandServices
NOSsoftware
disaggregatedfrom
hardware
NPBrunsasa
service of the
Adaptive CloudFabric
30

31. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
Pluribus Network Packet Broker Solution
31
Network Packet Broker
“virtual chassis”
Adaptive Cloud Fabric
TAP/SPAN/Mirror
Tools
Pluribus UNUM
Management +
Insight Analytics
Production Network
Modular, scale-out, IP fabric architecture
Centralized management
like a “virtual chassis”
Simple global policy automation
Multi-site unified fabric

32. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
Fully distributed, consistent, fabric-wide provisioning from any switch
Adaptive Cloud Fabric: Provisioning and Automation Simplified
32
Single point of management, consistent provisioning state
Standard network
protocols
Standard network
protocols
Standard network
protocols
Standard network
protocols
Distributed fabric
application
Distributed fabric
application
Distributed fabric
application
Distributed fabric
application
Single IP
1 2
§ Consistent provisioning state with rollback capability.
§ State synchronization upon adding new devices
§ Fabric-wide configurations to minimize human errors
§ 1-Touch services: eliminate 95% of configurations
One-touch configuration of fabric-wide services
Packet Broker aggregation, filtering and
replication policies
Abstraction Of The Network Topology

33. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
Fabric
“Virtual Chassis”
TOOL-GROUP-1
TOOL-GROUP-2
T
T
T
T
T
TAP-GROUP-2
TAP-GROUP-1
Admin
IP Underlay
“FILTER TCP port 22 traffic from TAP-GROUP-1 to TOOL-GROUP-2”
2. Admin programs a global filtering and replication
rule with a single declarative command:
3. The Fabric automates the programming of the rule
across all the switches of the Fabric
Simple Global Policy Automation
1. Admin assign Fabric ports to
TAP or Tool Groups from the
virtual chassis
33

34. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
T
IP Underlay
“Virtual Chassis”
Admin
Flexibility and Resilience of an IP Fabric
Filtering on Ingress
Dynamic path computations and
load balancing at hardware speed
Path recalculation and
re-convergence with
sub-second failover
against any switch or
link failure
Multi-chassis LAG
high-availability
34

35. © 2021 Pluribus Networks, Inc.
Summary: Software Defined Packet Broker Benefits
35
• Lower Capex
– Open whitebox economics
– Right-sized deployment options
• Scalability and Performance
– Scale flexibly to multi-switch, multi-site
– Graceful upgrades 10-25-100-400G
– Ensure continuous monitoring and visibility
– Use network capacity efficiently
• Lower Opex
– Simplified operations
– Reduced effort and errors

36. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Key EMA Takeaways
© 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Slide 36
Our research reveals
that NPBs can:
Optimize NetOps
Improve security
Enhance IT and business alignment
However…
Packet brokers are a premium technology
Management overhead demands
automation
Performance and reliability must be
accounted for

37. IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
Q&A
Slide 37 © 2021 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Learn more!
www.pluribusnetworks.com/solutions/network-packet-broker/
www.pluribusnetworks.com/contact-us/